Bathing-Suit Heroines

The heat of August brings the “Swimsuit Issue” to The New Yorker. Over at Culture Desk, Gregory Buck explores the mathematics of bathing suits and Carolyn Kormann writes about Leanne Shapton’s new book, “Swimming Studies.” Few people figure more prominently in the history of swimming in popular culture than Esther Williams, who was one of the “bathing-suit heroines” discussed by Alison Rose in a 1996 Letter from California. Rose chatted with Williams poolside (where else?) at the star’s Beverly Hills home:

Miss Williams likes to talk about bathing suits. She isn’t tired of them. (She even designs her own line, the Esther Williams Collection.) She told me about the suit she wore when she was fifteen, when she won the 1939 Nationals in Des Moines: “It was black, and it was totally transparent when it was wet. It was made of Chinese silk. It was like nothing on your body. And what you had to do was not notice that everything showed through. Your nipples—there was nothing left to the imagination. We all wore them, and we quickly got towels around us. They were called racing suits, and they were like wisps of silk—as if you had gone swimming in lingerie. And I think that helped a lot when I had to walk around a pool at M-G-M and be photographed. I had already got all that modesty thing taken care of, so I didn’t kind of creep around—because, you know, it’s a proud thing to be a swimming champion. So I walked, instead of wishing I could crawl into my shoulder blades, you know?”

Coverage, or the lack thereof, was also at the center of Rose’s conversations with Anne Cole, “the doyenne of the bathing-suit world,” whose father began making swimsuits in 1925. Cole recalled her decades of making appearances in department stores to promote Cole of California’s products:

“Every misshapen woman in America has come to see me,” she said. “They gather every problem they’ve ever had and come on in…. They come in and say, ‘I have a big-hip problem,’ and you get them in the fitting room and you know it’s never as horrible as you—well, I mean sometimes there are some big hips and there are bosoms dropping to the waist, bosoms heading south for the winter. But the philosophy of the swimsuit has changed. In the early days, in the fifties, when I first started, women didn’t exercise, so you really did have a cup, or a skirt for the hip problem or the big leg, the full leg—well, big heavy thigh, let’s call it what it is. But the maillot is the No. 1 silhouette selling today. We found it easier to go around the flab than to try to cut through it, and in doing that we make the leg look longer. It doesn’t cut the leg off at the worst spot and make it look dumpier.”

Inevitably (this was the mid-nineties), Rose got onto the subject of “Baywatch.” She called up Sydney Coale Phillips, who had played a lifeguard on the show, to get the skinny on those famous red suits:

I asked her if they ever wore thongs on the show. “They had them on the first few shows, but now the producers decided it’s a family show,” Sydney told me, and she added, “This is a butt-oriented culture. You know the bright-red tank suit cut low in the front, high in the back, that they wear on ‘Baywatch’? It’s verging on being a thong. It creeps up your backside, and when you had to do a saving scene it crept up and your entire buttocks were revealed to the world and to the camera. The assistant director had an electronic bullhorn, and he’d shout at the top of his lungs, ‘You have a wedgie! Pull down the wedgie!’ And then you’d have to fix it.”